RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Torturer Unmasked, Armour Begins to Fall

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 25 2000 (IPS) - Telma Jara was kidnapped by the repressive forces of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983) because she had been searching for her disappeared son. Her husband died of cancer not knowing if she was alive or dead. Now, at age 73, she has identified the business executive detained Thursday in Mexico as her torturer.

Miguel Angel Cavallo, head of Mexico’s National Vehicle Registry, was detained by the international police, Interpol, at the Cancún airport when he attempted to board a flight for Argentina the same day that the Mexican daily ‘Reforma’ had reported on his alleged participation in the dictatorship’s repressive forces.

Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón had issued an arrest warrant for him last December, but until now Cavallo had lived and worked in Mexico using a different first name. There, he served as the general director of the private firm contracted by the government to register Mexican automobiles.

He is currently being held in Mexico City, where he admitted that his true name is Miguel Angel and not Ricardo Miguel, as his identification papers indicate. He also acknowledged that he had served as captain in the Argentinean navy during the dictatorship.

Attorneys for former political prisoners in Argentina of Spanish and French citizenship petitioned justice authorities in Madrid and Paris to file for Cavallo’s extradition. According to torture victims who identified him, he was known as “Serpico” in the clandestine prison of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA).

The Argentinean military officer entered Mexico as a tourist on Oct 4, 1999, and obtained a work visa within a month, though the paperwork normally requires three months.

Argentinean embassy officials in Mexico reported they were unaware Cavallo was living in the country, despite the fact that his business deals had resulted in numerous television and newspaper interviews.

The Mexican Commission on Human Rights, a State agency, plans to file a complaint against the government for having allowed Cavallo to be named director of the vehicle registration system, especially when he is accused of car theft, among several other crimes.

Torture victim Jara was 52 when she began the search for her son, who had been kidnapped by government forces when he was just 17. She joined the Commission of Families of the Detained-Disappeared, and travelled to Mexico and to Rome, where she tried unsuccessfully to obtain an interview with the Pope.

But Jara’s husband fell ill in 1979 and she had to suspend the search.

“I spent all day caring for him. One night, when I left the hospital, they shined lights on me from all sides and kidnapped me. They took me directly to ESMA and tortured me,” Jara said Friday.

“It was all so brutalà They were like bloodthirsty beasts. Night would fall and they would awaken. One could here movements, comings and goings. People would return complaining about the tortures and the officials would appear with furniture, books and clothes from the (kidnapping) operations,” she added.

Jara, who was imprisoned for eight months, says she has no doubt that Cavallo was one of the people who kidnapped and tortured her.

Cavallo himself took her to Montevideo, across the Rio de la Plata, twice, for press interviews in which she was forced to lie. “One day he told me, with his face uncovered, that they took turns torturing us because the electric cattle-prod made their hands hurt,” she remembers.

Cavallo’s attempted trip Thursday to Argentina suggest that this country has turned into a sort of hideout for the military personnel who participated in the illegal repression that resulted in the disappearance of at least 10,000 people in the 1970s. Human rights groups put the total as high as 30,000 victims.

In Argentina, the officials were granted amnesty, but in other countries, authorities are stepping up pursuits of former dictatorship henchmen in an attempt to bring them to justice.

Cavallo is the second case in a month in which a military officer has been arrested in a foreign country for human rights violations committed in Argentina during the dictatorship. Retired army major Jorge Olivera, arrested a couple weeks ago in Italy, was the first.

Olivera was travelling in Italy with his wife when Interpol agents arrested him on a warrant issued by French authorities. He faces charges in the kidnapping and disappearance of French citizen Marianne Erize in Argentina.

According to the testimonies of other detainees, she died at a clandestine prison five days after she was kidnapped.

The Argentinean government has so far defended the principle of “territoriality” to protect the 48 military officials who face arrest warrants, issued by judge Garzón in Spain, for human rights crimes.

Horacio Méndez Carrera, attorney for victims of human rights violations in Argentina, points to the similarities between the Olivera case and that of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was held under house arrest in London from October 1998 until last March as he awaited proceedings for extradition to Spain requested by Garzón.

Both situations show that travel abroad is risky for those who have been accused of human rights violations when they have not been brought to justice in the country where the crimes were committed, Méndez Carrera said. The same thing is now happening to Cavallo.

By Friday, there were a growing number of former political prisoners who identified Cavallo as a member of the ESMA detention centre operations.

Argentinean journalist Juan Gasparini, now living in Switzerland, affirms that Cavallo kidnapped and tortured him, and one day took him – wearing a hood – to his home.

While Gasparini and Cavallo waited in the car, other agents broke into the house and shot Gasparini’s wife, Mónica Jáuregui, and a friend, Olga Aldaya.

Víctor Basterra and Graciela Daleo, both former prisoners of the dictatorship, denounced Friday that Cavallo is on judge Garzón’s list along with another hundred Argentinean military personnel who also face international arrest warrants and that they cannot leave the country or they will be detained by Interpol.

Basterra was kidnapped during the dictatorship along with his wife and two-month-old daughter, but he was later freed and filed a lawsuit with Argentinean justice authorities. After the government granted pardons and amnesties to the military officials and their subordinates, Basterra presented his testimony before judge Garzón.

“If it were not for those of us who survived, (the torturers) would go on with their daily lives,” he said. “But the charges brought before international justice authorities has made them a bit more vulnerableà but just a little, because they are still very powerful.”

Jara’s testimony Friday was especially moving. Terrified after her eight months in captivity, she had never renewed her participation in the work of human rights groups, nor had she engaged in protests against the government’s pardons or amnesty of the military.

“While they tortured me I tried to control the pain by thinking about how I had to survive in order to see my granddaughter again and to continue looking for my son, Gustavo. To think I would never see my granddaughter again hurt more than the torture, but they would say terrible things to me,” she said, 21 years after the horror.

“My husband died that May, alone, but I did not find out until August. I was released in December but I never went out again. I was left with an enormous fear. Just recently have I been able to sleep without waking from nightmares. Now I can see that justice is slow, but it comes, though there are still many more who have yet to fall.”